Understanding how changes to a business process within a company or enterprise affect the goals of the business, such as those of maximizing revenue, profit, or market share, is of enormous importance and has a significant impact on the company's success in the marketplace. Ideally therefore, changes to business processes should be monitored and/or tested in much the same ways as changes to manufacturing processes are monitored and/or tested. In particular, it is important to know how various changes within the business enterprise drive changes in various metrics, so that management can understand which changes are successful and which are not.
Despite the above described need, it is often difficult to show how a change in a part of a business process influences a metric. Part of the problem is that at least some available statistical tools rely on the premise that a numerical goal remains stable. For some types of processes, for example, transactional processes, this premise is not the case. A retail or service business, for example, is typically always expected to grow its market share through increasing sales, revenue, and profits.